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Many people here are selling their software for a living. For all you authors suffering from cracks and keygens, this tool I made will make things a bit easier. It searches for illegal downloads of your software and presents them in a list, so you can file a DMCA complaint with rapidshare and similar hosting companies, so that your illegal downloads are removed (and then more will be listed )

Intriguing tool! I work for a company (Planetside Software) whose products (Terragen) are routinely posted to Rapidshare, etc. so this could be very useful.

I haven't tried it yet, but if it doesn't yet have a built-in DMCA complaint filing function, that would be a great feature. Perhaps a pluggable system that allows you to add new sites with their corresponding emails or complaint URLs (many require you to submit through an online form). Ideally it could create a form letter for each one that lists the infringing URL and all the usual info they ask for in DMCA requests (name, address, position in company, confirmation that you are authorized to act on behalf of the company, etc.). That would save tremendous amounts of time.

Quite honestly we don't file a lot of requests right now because of how time consuming it is. Searching for the infringing downloads is a great start, but automating the complaint process would be a much bigger help IMO.

Definitely useful if you have a large collection of the public trackers and other download sites. There's a whole lot of private trackers as well, though - going to be hard to do anything about those. But I guess the biggest damage is from the public sites anway

Yes, I think there is a core of more dedicated/savvy users who have more advanced methods of obtaining pirated software. These you will never be able to stop. But keeping your app off a simple Google search, I think *that* is going to make an impact in piracy numbers. Searching for "Terragen 2", our flagship product, brings up warez results at the top of the 2nd page, and that's *without* putting in "crack" or "download" or anything else specific:http://www.google.com/#hl...N&fp=a2bb30ecf4f91972

Sounds to me like this tool would be of more use to pirates for finding cracks...

Hardly. The pirates already know where to look, and even regular users know how to use rapidshare, usenet and public torrent trackers (at least here in .dk, YRMV). Content is widely duplicated across these services, so it's not like this tool will help people who only know one resource, either.

I will be adding many things in the future, including the option to automatically file the DMCA complaint email. In the meantime, as this tool is based on a quirky 'technology' I would appreciate your feedback, whether it works for you or not.

anyone can find cracks to any software, just google <your_program_name> + rapidshare. The hard bit is finding all these illegal downloads, and this tool of mine helps find many of them. Not all but every little helps!

Don't a lot of these illegal methods of 'stealing' software contain malware or viruses of some sort? I personally would be afraid to download any of these pirated software. I prefer to pay for it so the creator can keep updating and improving his product. Besides which, there is enough free and open source software available if you cannot afford to purchase a particular item.

^ Well, yes. I'd hope that most supporters of this site would fall into the same category as you. But in the world wide interwebs, there are more that don't share this point of view than do, unfortunately.

I personally have a big problem with piracy. Although I give away a free version, most people use a keygen to pirate xplorer2

When I got tired of hunting keygens, instead of blocking them I went for a different approach: if xplorer2 detects a keygenned key it 'allows' it but every now and then sends such people to this page: www.zabkat.com/warez.htm

from the statistics of this page I know that 90%+ of my users use such fake keys!

Hehe, yep. I was on the page multiple times when I already had a license, just to check something there.

Concerning the crack tracker:For pirates this software is not of any interest. I tried to find some software with it, and I noticed that, while it kept reloading, I would already have had the software for a while if I had used eMule instead.

Logged

I bet when Cheetahs race and one of them cheats, the other one goes "Man, you're such a Cheetah!" and they laugh & eat a zebra or whatever.

perhaps you misunderstood, crack tracker is not a search engine, it looks for cracks to your software. By default not all internal search engines are enabled too, so use View > Engines menu to tick them all active

umeca74,I think this is a fantastic idea. I love it. I'm very interested in this and will be following very closely. I'll send you suggestions as i come up with them. Thank you for this very great effort.

I hope this can be extended from software to ebooks, videos, audio, etc.

Since I am not a code author, I really have no use for this sort of thing, but I am interested in it from a curiosity point of view. Have you noticed a significant increase in purchases and/or a significant decrease in cracked versions being published? I would expect, human nature being what it is, that you see no significant increase in purchases, but perhaps a significant decrease in publishing IF the software is used regularly. However that is just speculation. Can you tell us your experience?

crack tracker cannot stop cracks, even if you eliminate all the existing ones, new ones will come to replace them, it is a constant battle

as to how sales will be affected once you make it harder for people to find warez, it is debatable. Obviously I believe that legitimate sales will increase, as people really wanting the software will have no other option. But if you are on a really crowded market they may just go to your easy to crack competitor...